Lucy Tirado, 50, was walking through the store when one of the shelves fell on her husband, breaking his leg.

“It just collapsed in everybody who was walking through the aisles, it was horrible,” she said. “I saw a woman’s hand sticking out asking for help and heard children crying.”

Firefighters arrived and began removing merchandise from the store by hand, bringing it out to the street.

“A number of the shelves including the stock collapsed creating a cascading effect,” said deputy chief Anthony Montera. “We had three or four aisles of shelving that came down on the customers in the store.”

“We had to remove a lot of the items by hand to the street in order to get underneath,” he continued. “There’s some shelving down there, we also had to remove that very gingery to make sure nobody was trapped under the debris.”